Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
Trailer Watch: Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine
In Kate Plays Christine, which premiered earlier this year at Sundance, filmmaker Robert Greene tackles the story of Sarasota TV journalist Christine Chubbuck, who shot herself live on-air in 1974 and died 14 hours later. But rather than taking a straightforward documentary approach to Chubbuck’s story, Greene instead chronicles actress Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparation to play Chubbuck in a film that will conclude with her suicide. While Greene’s previous film Actress explored the real life of actress Brandy Burre, Kate Plays Christine relies on a constructed situation to which Sheil must act and react. Footage of Sheil preparing for the role are intercut with […]
-
How To Talk to Your Investors about IRC Section 181
At Filmmaker we have covered Section 181, the United States’ film tax credit incentive, quite extensively, but this article by entertainment attorney Daniel J. Coplan, Esq. is both a great overview of how the incentive actually works for individual investors as well as an explanation of one underknown element. The latter concerns the ability of some investors to deduct against ordinary income, not passive income. In short, if you’re raising private equity for a U.S. film this year, read on. (This piece was originally published on LinkedIn and is reprinted with permission.) The purpose of this short article is to […]
-
Ghost of a Ghost: Alain Gagnol on His Animated Noir Feature Phantom Boy and Co-Director’s Jean-Loup Felicioli’s Designs
Heroically serving as a lifeboat of ingenuity and sophistication while a flood of CG talking animal features drowns the animated landscape, GKIDS offers uniquely conceived, handcrafted and thoughtful storytelling in a medium that has often reached its greatest potential through the pencils and brushes of those seeking to create art rather than doll-selling tentpoles. The independent animation distributor has eight Academy Award nominations under its belt, and few companies in field have remained as truthful to their mantra as these New York-based dream confectioners. Earlier this year GKIDS released in the States the acclaimed, Paris-set steampunk adventure, April and the […]
-
“I Tried Not to Be Didactic”: Werner Herzog on His MasterClass
A frequent and vocal opponent of film schools, the director Werner Herzog founded his own, the Rogue Film School, in 2009. He teaches students in weekend seminars held at varying locations around the world in what it feels like an oppositional practice to the standard four-year university programs. Now, Herzog has taken the Rogue Film School concept one step further by devising his own online program through MasterClass. The course is available online for $90 and offers 26 video lessons with accompanying exercises and course materials. I spoke to Herzog about the production of the class, his expectations for the course, […]
-
Fix It in Production: A 1st A.D. Tells You What Mistakes to Avoid when Shooting an Independent Film
I’ve been writing, shooting and producing short films, about twenty of them, since 1999. I’ve also DP’d several shorts and a zombie feature. I enjoy assisting other filmmakers in North Carolina, where I live, and I’ve worked as AD over the last five years on both short- and long-form projects. The projects I’ve ADed have had budgets ranging from the tiny to the small, all well under $100,000. More about my work at Turnip Films. This article describes what I’ve learned as AD about how to run a shoot. Everyone I’ve worked with did their best and turned out some […]
-
Les Cowboys Writer/Director Thomas Bidegain on Contemporary Westerns, His Journey to Directing, and the Importance of the “B-Book”
In theaters now from Cohen Media, Les Cowboys is the directorial debut of acclaimed French screenwriter Thomas Bidegain, best known in recent years for his collaborations with French director Jacques Audiard. (He has co-scripted all of Audiard’s films following The Beat My Heart Skipped.) In an age when the value of the cinematic medium is being challenged, Bidegain has made a haunting and bold first feature that is both intimate as well as epic in scope. It’s a film steeped in the history of cinema, drawing both visual and narrative inspiration from classic American westerns. At the same time, Les […]
-
Cinema Great Abbas Kiarostami Dies at 76
One of cinema’s great masters, Abbas Kiarostami, whose pictures could be intimate and human-scaled while also self-reflexive and bracingly political, died today in Paris. The Palme D’Or winner — for Taste of Cherry in 1997 — passed away following treatment for gasto-intestinal cancer. Speaking to The Guardian, director Asghar Farhadi said, “He wasn’t just a film-maker, he was a modern mystic, both in his cinema and his private life. He definitely paved ways for others and influenced a great deal of people. It’s not just the world of cinema that has lost a great man; the whole world has lost […]
-
Get MōVI Level Shots From Your GoPro With This Stabilizer from Polaroid
Polaroid sent over their handheld 3-axis stabilizer for GoPro for a hands on review. In the video below I do a run through of the device along with taking it out for a spin with some test footage. At $180 it’s one of the least expensive gimbals for GoPro, and the shots are impressively smooth. Controlling the camera takes a little getting used to. It works with the HERO 3/3+/4. You can use it with or without an LCD BacPac (it includes a spacer when using it without). I caved and bought the screen because it was getting hard to operate holding a phone […]
-
The Campaign to Revive Early Films from Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes
Led by IFP founder Sandra Schulberg, who serves as its president, the nonprofit IndieCollect is working to conserve independent cinema. In just two years, the company has rescued and archived more than 3,500 film negatives, according to Schulberg, the president of IndieCollect. IndieCollect recently located the master picture and sound elements for eight of the shorts Vachon and Haynes produced in the ’80s and ’90s with Barry Ellsworth under their non-profit Apparatus banner. Apparatus backed a number of other directors, including Suzan-Lori Parks, Mary Hestand, Susan Delson, Brooke Dammkoehler, Larry Carty, and Evan Dunsky. Now the company has launched a Kickstarter campaign with hopes of raising […]
-
Colorist Bryan McMahan on Knight of Cups, Working with Terrence Malick and the HDR Future
The Horatio Alger myth for the Golden Age of Hollywood’s studio system involved a bright, ambitious lad working his way up from the mailroom or his post as a clapper boy. By the time Bryan McMahan entered the movie business in the late ’70s, that studio system had long crumbled, but his beginnings were every bit as humble. McMahan’s first gig was as a film lab janitor. Thirty-odd years later he’s Terrence Malick’s colorist of choice, having worked as either the digital intermediate colorist or the mastering colorist on The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life, […]
